New Yorkers can now commerce of their crimson public library playing cards for a particular version honoring the centennial of the Schomburg Middle for Analysis in Black Tradition in Harlem.
Designed by the New York Public Library (NYPL) and the Brooklyn-based studio Morcos Key, the limited-edition library card options the late sculptor Houston Conwill’s 1991 “Rivers,” a terrazzo artwork set up on the Schomburg underneath which the poet Langston Hughes’s ashes are interred. Conwill’s cosmogram nods to Hughes’s 1921 poem “The Negro Speaks of Rivers,” first printed within the journal of the Nationwide Affiliation for the Development of Coloured Individuals, by which the poet proclaimed, “My soul has grown deep like the rivers.”
The playing cards shall be out there in any respect NYPL places whereas in inventory because the Schomburg kicks off a year-long collection of programming celebrating its centenary. Final Thursday, Could 8, the middle debuted the playing cards together with the opening of 100: A Century of Collections, Neighborhood, and Creativity, which incorporates an inscribed copy of Zora Neale Hurston’s 1937 novel Their Eyes Have been Watching God, gifted personally from the creator to Schomburg.
“Rivers” is each a memorial to Hughes and to the middle’s namesake, the Puerto Rico-born scholar and prolific collector of Black historical past and literature, Arturo Schomburg. In 1940, the NYPL renamed its division for Black historical past, literature, and prints after Schomburg, from whom the library acquired hundreds of artifacts, together with manuscripts and volumes associated to Black literature, artwork, the Harlem Renaissance, narratives of enslaved individuals, and diasporic historical past.
On the ground of the Schomburg’s Langston Hughes Foyer, traces from “The Negro Speaks of Rivers” populate the copper-colored cosmogram, encircled by a blue band bearing the names of the Mississippi, Congo, Nile, and Euphrates rivers, all of which Hughes conjures in his poem. Blue traces movement out of the cosmogram in 4 instructions, extending throughout the foyer flooring. On the Schomburg’s special-edition library card, a model of the paintings peeks by means of one of many zeroes in “100.”
Houston Conwill’s 1991 cosmogram, “Rivers,” on the Schomburg Middle’s Langston Hughes Foyer
Conwill, who died in 2016, designed one other cosmogram connecting waterways to freedom struggles entitled “The Freedom Ring” (1994) on the Neighborhood School of Philadelphia. The New York Metropolis Artwork Fee awarded the sculptor the design contract for the Schomburg’s foyer in 1990.
Kinshasha Holman Conwill, director emerita of the Nationwide Museum of African American Historical past and Tradition, advised Hyperallergic in a press release that “Rivers” was her late husband’s favourite fee.
“His love for Langston Hughes, the legacy of Arturo Schomburg, and Harlem itself were met in the creation of Rivers,” Holman Conwill stated. “Knowing that it is a library card animates and magnifies even further his love of all things Schomburg and its patrons — the people of New York, his favorite city.”
In a press release to Hyperallergic, Schomburg Middle Director Pleasure Bivins described the cosmogram because the “heart” of the middle and as a “beloved gathering place, a public work of art, [and] a space for reflection.”
“We could think of no better image for the special-edition Centennial library card. People from across the globe visit us to view it and marvel at the fact that they can pay their respects to our namesake and the ‘poet laureate of Harlem,’” Bivins continued. “This library card allows every patron to hold a piece of Schomburg’s history in their pocket.”
